Resources

Articles

COBOL defined business software development for decades. Now, is it over the hill or just hitting its prime? by Curtis Franklin Jr. Elastic COBOL Elastic COBOL is part of Heirloom Platform-as-a-Service (Paas), an application development toolset that is a plug-in to the Eclipse IDE framework. Elastic COBOL allows mainframe applications (including CICS and JCL) to...
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Scott M. Fulton Bringing COBOL Into the 21st Century Banks are reluctant to break their reliance upon mainframe systems, in part due to a reliance on COBOL. Now some vendors offer tools that may help. Though it’s generally more cost-effective to consolidate services on modern servers, many new variables can raise costs quickly. It’s a problem I…
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“Installing keys and license daemons on end user hardware is invasive and troublesome, and moving that process to the cloud provides an extremely elegant alternative with significant upsides for application providers and their clients.”
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“Companies often struggle with the question of how best to keep using their legacy mainframe COBOL applications (and the business knowledge built into them), but still keep their business agile and their costs low. Legacy modernization platform provider Heirloom Computing thinks the answer is to move the applications to the cloud on a pay-as-you-go basis.”…
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“With the Heirloom cloud-based job scheduler, cloud instances are started and stopped by the scheduler during a batch window. The scheduler and the job entry subsystem divide jobs into classes of resources – CPU, database, network – manages concurrency among a large pool of resources, and collects job report output for later viewing, printing or…
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“Heirloom is touting this as a big step forward in the modernization of legacy applications. And that, of course, is what the company’s modus operandi is all about. Heirloom’s ELPaaS was designed to help enterprises and their trusted providers in shifting older software applications that are required for running the business to the cloud computing…
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“Heirloom Computing Inc. has formed a new partnership with Java Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider CloudBees to speed the transition of mainframe workloads to the CloudBees PaaS. With the partnership, Heirloom will deploy COBOL-based mainframe workloads to the cloud, using Heirloom Elastic COBOL and the CloudBees Platform.” Heirloom’s Elastic COBOL enables enterprises to leverage...
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“With so much riding on cloud-enabled applications (to say nothing of the need for application ubiquity), GOPaaS may offer the perfect compromise solution providers and system integrators need when looking to make the best of an organization’s application migration situation.”
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FREMONT, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Heirloom Computing today announced that OCLC has utilized Heirloom PaaS to enhance IT agility by transforming a mission-critical mainframe workload to a cost-effective, open-systems platform. When OCLC needed to enhance IT agility, they discovered that Heirloom PaaS was aligned with their need to modernize their application portfolio, and move away from their dependence on an...
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Heirloom Computing, Inc. today announced the certification of Heirloom PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) under the CenturyLink Cloud Marketplace Provider Program. Heirloom PaaS is a patented software platform that automates the transformation of mission-critical enterprise COBOL/CICS applications to 100 percent Java source and the cloud. By simply getting started with the CenturyLink Cloud Blueprint, prospective users can easily...
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Fremont, CA (February 26, 2013) – Heirloom Computing Inc. today announced a first-of-its-kind scheduler to run batch jobs on ELPaaS, Heirloom’s Platform-as-a-Service for moving mission-critical enterprise applications to the cloud. The Heirloom Job Scheduler works with Heirloom’s Job Entry Subsystem (JES) to make it easier and much less expensive for IT managers to manage their…
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Fremont, CA (January 29, 2013) – Heirloom Computing Inc. today announced a new partnership with Java Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider CloudBees to speed the transition of mainframe workloads to the CloudBees PaaS. With the partnership, Heirloom will help IT managers lower costs and modernize their COBOL-based mainframe workloads by deploying them to the…
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Fremont, CA (January 2, 2013) – Heirloom Computing Inc. today announced GOPaaS, a service to quickly and easily SaaS-enable and modernize mission-critical enterprise software, allowing businesses running legacy software to reap the benefits of cloud computing immediately. Using the GOPaaS service, businesses can host any existing legacy application in the Cloud. By moving to
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FREMONT, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Heirloom Computing Inc. today announced the formation of a new division to focus on the EMEA region and the appointment of Reza Warnink to head the region, which covers Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Heirloom Computing is on a mission to efficiently modernize the world’s business-critical enterprise software applications. Heirloom’s ELPaaS (Enterprise…
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Heirloom Computing Inc. today announced a new partnership with HP to speed the transition of mainframe workloads to HP Cloud Services. Under the partnership, Heirloom will consult with IT departments seeking to move COBOL-based mainframe workloads to HPs public cloud infrastructure.
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Heirloom Computing Inc. today announced the appointment of Kevin Moultrup as Chief Operating Officer. Moultrup, a 25-year software industry veteran and former senior executive of industry leader Micro Focus, is focused on strengthening the company’s sales and marketing functions and building industry partnerships.
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Heirloom Computing, the Silicon Valley software company with a mission to enable existing applications to seamlessly participate in cloud computing infrastructures, today announced the availability of its ELPaaS platform.
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Blog

Mainframe COBOL/CICS/VSAM to Java Application Server & Relational DB TL;DR — Watch the video below to see how Heirloom PaaS automatically takes a complex mainframe warehousing application to Java in 60 seconds with 100% accuracy, guaranteed. Migrating mainframe workloads to anywhere is hard, right? You may have seen vendor presentations that promise an assured migration process, led by analysis tools...
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Voyager 1 fires thrusters for the first time in 37 years. Running a proprietary assembler program written over 40 years ago engineers at NASA were able to use the voyagers thrusters to replace attitude correction engine that had degraded over the last 40 years. This extends the lifetime of the voyager 1 probe for another...
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Introduction Reading about Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, CI/CD, and unit testing etc all seem a million miles away from daily life on the Mainframe. In fact there is a basic question to be answered for all projects, “Why do we need to do continuous integration?”. Agile Guru, Martin Fowler puts it best (he usually does) when...
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This is part 1 of a series of articles investigating why organisations should consider Mainframe Migration, the options they have and the steps they need to take to transform their mainframe workloads to run on the cloud. Lets set the scene a little bit for a typical large organisation that runs business critical applications on the...
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How To Make An Agile Dinosaur Would you be skeptical of a claim from a vendor that stated you can take existing mainframe workloads (online and batch), and automatically transform them (with 100% accuracy) into instantly agile Java applications that can immediately be deployed to the cloud? You wouldn’t be alone. For many of...
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Extending Heirloom PaaS Applications There’s a lot of chatter about how to make mainframe workloads agile. I have contributed to that chatter myself. The discourse is essential. Boiled down, my assertion is that the mainframe ecosystem is foundationally not agile (and never will be). No amount of DevOps tooling, nor vendor misdirection is going...
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TL;DR — see picture above, or… a career COBOL’er makes a compelling argument that legacy application systems (COBOL et al) on the IBM Mainframe are killing IT digital transformation initiatives. So, a heads-up… this article is going to be self-serving (at least to start with, perhaps longer), as I’ve come to the conclusion that it...
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Not 3 words you’d immediately assemble together, but that’s exactly what Senior ComputerWorld Editor, Patrick Thibodeau, did yesterday. His article was prompted by a White House announcement of an “Office of American Innovation” to oversee the modernization of federal IT. The article then goes on to give Compuware a platform to launch a somewhat bizarre...
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Introduction Elastic Batch Platform (EBP), Elastic Transaction Platform (ETP) and Elastic COBOL runtime environments are designed for scaleability and high-availability in a public or private cloud environment. First, we present the layout of a typical COBOL application (fig. 1) which divides the portions of the application into the typical 3-layer model: (1) presentation logic, (2)...
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Heirloom PaaS in the News We’ve been recently featured in InformationWeek Article COBOL Leads Us Back To The Future By CURTIS FRANKLIN JR. Executive Editor, Technical Content, 6/21/2015 COBOL defined business software development for decades. Now, is it over the hill or just hitting its prime? Elastic COBOL Elastic COBOL is part of Heirloom Platform-as-a-Service...
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I’ve been involved with COBOL for most of my professional career. It is a language that has many unique characteristics, not all positive. Loved by few and (unfairly) vilified by many, it has persisted because it is extremely good at what it was built for — encapsulating business rules. Many of you who have experience...
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Introduction Elastic Transaction Platform (ETP), Elastic Batch Platform (EBP) and Elastic COBOL runtime environments are designed for running enterprise applications migrated from a mainframe environment and to scale and be highly-availabile in public or private cloud environments. The system is architected to scale-out across a private or public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). As more power is required...
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Introduction Elastic COBOL transactions containing calls to IBM CICS services are packaged as Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) and execute under control of the Elastic Transaction Platform (ETP) within a JEE Application Server. There are several ways to access these transactions, From other transactions running in the same EJB or “CICS region” with EXEC CICS LINK...
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